


no flowers

by votives



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Branding, Character Study, Drunk Sex, Eating Disorders, Extremely Dubious Consent, Eye Trauma, F/M, Medical Trauma, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Post-Canon, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-16 00:09:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17538944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/votives/pseuds/votives
Summary: Tim figures that the Eleseer would be the last that he ever saw of the Firehawk. Years later, he is detained at her pleasure and brought to account for his actions.





	1. sanctuary

Tim is a bird with no nest. He has dossed down in all manner of places over the course of the years: some pasteboard slabs in a skag den back East, a corpse's bathtub, a cot in Lynchwood's county jail and now a cell in Sanctuary's nerve centre. The Crimson Raiders have given him the VIP treatment. His bed is a real one—with a pillow and a throw-over and a roof above his head. The bedroll does little to cushion his spine from the metal but it's the plushest bed he's known in months.

He lolls on his back and plots the black mould overhead like stars. He harks back to the night sky back home. He doesn't recall his sister's name. But her favourite constellation was a bird that soared so high the galaxy streamed through its wingtips. His had tangents and edges like a rocket ship that could fly him to the farthest stretches of the universe.

Tim's imagination is a gift that he comes by honestly. It was a need, once, to commit something to paper or be rendered asunder. Now he uses it to get drunk on nothing, to jury-rig his pistol and improvise weapons of pipe and flax. But he couldn't cobble together a way out of this.

"Long time no see, Jack." The siren's face is up against the bars. Tim hasn't seen her in person since her last attempt on their lives. She looks older, angrier. The kind of angry that makes a home for itself in your core. The kind of angry that payback doesn't fix. She and Jack are two sides of the same coin. The siren's saving grace is some semblance of moral decency. 

"Lilith."

Her men are throwing a pizza party in his honour. It's pepperoni with a good stink. Tim feels it smouldering in a layer beneath his skin. He has been eavesdropping while they split the slices. The blue-haired siren kicks back with the four-fingered alien on a laundry machine. A serviceman illustrates tall tales with his hands as he relays them to a little girl with a switchblade. She forges a doll out of clay and an empty artillery shell. He would ask after Roland but he knows better. There's a subtle edge—like they're all thinking the same thing and nobody dares to articulate it.

Pandora finds nobody that's somebody, nobody that belongs someplace else. In a universe of round holes, the Crimson Raiders have built a home for the square pegs. It's nice in a rotary way. He'd be lying if he said he wasn't jealous. The camaraderie leaves him homesick for people he's trying his best to forget.

"You look like crap, killer. I almost didn't recognise you." Almost. There it is. The kicker. She clocks his ponytail and his bristly lantern jaw and his black eye as if she isn't convinced it's really him. Ill will rolls off her in waves.

"That's what I'm going for, babe." It sends her reeling. Tim's champion smile doesn't reach his eyes but trumpets the gap her cronies made in his teeth. Point-scoring is as juvenile as Lilith's code of ethics but he's long since stopped trying to retain some semblance of pride.

He half-expects her to phasewalk through the tank and let him have it. She rocks on balls of her feet as she deliberates whether it is worth it. The bruiser centres on her before she has a chance to make up her mind. Tim's memory of the night the baroness had them chased out of the Up Over is hazy at best but he's certain today is the first time he met his fist. He can tell the guy is from Menoetius because he's the size of a titan and when he rests his hand on Lilith's shoulder, it engulfs it entirely.

"You doing alright, man? Sorry about your eye," he says, teeth boasting an acrid red varnish. "Not gonna lie, it feels kinda bad, Lil. The Sheriff's boys were knocking him into the middle of next Tuesday."

Lilith's face folds with scornful derision as the one she calls Brick slides a slice between the bars like some conciliatory gift. Tim has less faith in the pizza than a Hammerlock on the whites of a bullymong den. He lets the toppings cowp over. They make a wet sound as they smack the concrete, right next to the blood he spat all over their floor.

"Yeah, it was kinda crappy of you," Tim raps. "Punching the blind and all."

"That alien dude got me thinking. We gotta set a standard. The dude's a Vault Hunter. One of us."

"That bastard is not one of us."

"Poor guy came quietly and we kicked his ass anyway huh, guapo?" says the rangy one with the goggles that had shattered his. He bears the hum of Rakk-ale like a cheap cologne. Tim wants to wring the guy and drink of it.

"Why, Jack?"

"Why what?"

"You heard me. You coulda put up a fight. You coulda ran. Why didn't you?"

"Oh my god. Seriously?" Lilith is a headache that will not relent, Tim pushes his palms into his eyesockets. "You're asking me why I didn't wanna take on a siren— _a freakin' siren_ —and three or four guys holding guns the size of their bodies? I mean, I'm flattered and all. But I'm not _totally insane."_

"You could have at least tried. You held out this long. Why throw in the towel now?"

"Because I'm tired, all right? Tired of running, tired of jobs, tired of living in dump sites, tired of looking over my shoulder. Besides, I'm pretty sure that guy in the helmet had a sword."

"See?" Lilith throws her hands up in the air as if the jury is out. "The Hyperion skaglick is practically begging us to skin him with his own teeth."

"This is aint what we're about. If Roland—"

"Roland—" Lilith inhales shakily then hardens like a rock. "Roland would want us to wipe Hyperion off the map once and for all. He's the reason I—"

"Lil, just look at the sky."

There's a clamour of voices and chewing noises and Tim rolls off on his side with his back to the world knowing that his fate is set. This time tomorrow he'll be a raw-boned corpse descending freely from the floating city's sides.

The next morning, nobody bothers to administer his last rites. Instead, they haul him gracelessly from his cell and drag him by his feet through the dirt. Goggles parades tan lines and wears them up about his head, spitting sorries every time Tim's head hits the ground. Sanctuary is well past the zenith. The height makes his knees buckle. The Raiders truss him up and with a gun to his temple, they tell him to talk.

So, he talks.

He tells them that home is Eden-5: a snug planet that sleeps in the farthest quarter of the star system. From the comfortable distance of the Hyperion docking station, it's less of a celestial body and more of a pea suspended in space; unassuming and insignificant.

Maybe it's the orbital perspective. Maybe it's his youthful idealism. Maybe it's the altitude. But from his vantage point on the shuttle to Helios, Tim feels like nothing can reach him. Not the cold. Not his acrophobia. Not the men that muscle their way into his mother's home to take his grandma's jewellery.

A lesser man would curse the poverty that he was born of but all it managed to instil into him was patience and one hell of a work ethic. Months of clinical trials, cleaning toilets and penning slogans for off-brand shampoo earned him a hand-me-down suit and a one-way ticket offworld. Tim flies economy with the H-beams and the robot components.

His fingers find the fabric of a dead man's collar and he tries to subdue his unease with the prospect of major medical and the money he'll be able to send home to his mom. His family is saddled with enough debt to stop a moonshot in its tracks. He cannot afford to go home empty handed. Tim spent weeks preparing his very best firm handshake and answers to questions that make his skin crawl. He knows Hyperion's accuracy as well as a friend. He knows all about Dividing Faults and the cutbacks and the reverse recoil. He has blinkers on. He is ready to sell himself, to tell Hyperion how many nuts and bolts hold its orbiting cancer together, how many skeletons line the walls.

That is until he lands. A half-second after stepping into the Immigration Station, he dredges the ground with his nerves and his papers. After he empties the contents of his stomach, he is ordered to empty the contents of his pockets. Something obsessive-compulsive and twice his size sanitises the deck whilst the desk jockeys look on. Suddenly, every conversation, every whisper and every cough is about him. In the Central Terminal, he loses himself in a sea of neckties, pantsuits and side-eyes. His only welcome comes in the form of an irksome CL4P-TP robot that points him in the direction of an elevator. As it sweeps up to the executive suite, he wants, more than anything, to be back home shivering in the dark.

Tim's face is not cut from stone. He has cracks in his voice. He sticks to the walls, to the fringes, to the quiet corners. He is not of the Hyperion pedigree. It's some solace for his unsettled soul. When he relays as much to Lilith (eyes burning like a funeral pyre) she scoffs at the notion. But there was good in him once.

And if everyone makes mistakes; this was his.

The reception has the sterile atmosphere of a hospital. It's all height and no breadth. The lady at the desk is the picture of Hyperion hospitality. She is steely and as blunt as her bangs. They hang above her face like a guillotine. She approaches and his tie tightens a notch with each click of her heels. She ends up uncoupling it for him anyway.

She ushers him into a chair that smells of alcohol and Tim slumps into it like a slab of inert matter, hoping she doesn't notice his gums or the holes in the soles of his shoes. She's isn't interested in his resume; she's interested in pulling at his tongue, getting a good look at his teeth and asking if he smokes.

"Uh, no. Is this really necessary?" Tim asks as she manipulates his head into a sniffing position, nails raking at his face. He fights for purchase on the plastic.

"It's the standard procedure."

"Oh." He swallows. "For the insurance, right?"

She laughs. Eventually, his answer comes in the form of his written documents. They are deposited on his lap with a great thud. Tim thinks they must have cleared an entire rainforest to provide the paper. When his application form queries his medical history, he neglects to mention the capsules that temper his heart rate and upset his stomach.

She asks him if he's had anything to eat in the last eight hours and he shakes his head no. In truth, he was too keyed up for breakfast. He hadn't felt like he'd earned it. When he requests a cup of water, she checks her watch and tells him no. It's only months later when Jack, with his Midas touch, guts the corporation and galls it gold that he realises that the flags she raised were a claret Hyperion red.

A man with a clipboard (who he'll come to know by his lackadaisical bedside manner) calls his name and he is buzzed in, heart in his throat. Tim asks all manner of questions as Dr. Autohn chaperones him to his first appointment with the man he'll come to be. They spill out of him in a cataract of anxiety. Nobody cares to give answers. This is the first instance where time stops. A liminal space. A line in the dirt. And if he'd have known, he'd have called his mom one last time. But Tim's never been good at goodbyes or reading people or planning ahead. He should have listened to his gut.

Jack heads a board of dirge-like faces, shifty eyes and stethoscopes. He feels like he walked in on a conference for lab coats. The lining of Tim's throat turns caustic and he can't shake the feeling that this is one of those TV shows with the hidden cameras. Jack is still young. Kinda juvenile in retrospect. He's good-looking and _god,_ does he know it. He has his boots up on the desk like a teenager and when Tim approaches, his face lights up like a Mercenary Day tree. He wears a _boy-am-I-glad-to-see-you_ smile, the kind of smile strangers wear in fairy tales. His shirt flashes a bold yellow warning.

Tim extends a hand in greeting and wishes he'd bothered to wipe down his sweaty palms. But there wasn't a bathroom or even an exit. The place is airtight to seal something in. There's no handshake. Just the sort of base look he'd come to accrue with a cheap drink from across a dive bar.

"It's nice to meet you, sir. I'm—"

"I'm not interested in your name, babe. Just siddown." Jack gesticulates. "Make yourself comfortable."

Tim is the furthest thing from comfortable—fingers trembling against his hairline as seats himself.

Jack crosses the expanse of the office and revolves round Tim's chair like a wake of Rakks circling a piece of carrion. Multiple sets of eyes rove over his every inch. He considers that maybe he is being sized up for something other than his uniform.

"So—you think we wanna harvest your organs, huh? I gotta tell ya, that's pretty rich." Jack's voice is as tight as a noose. "I mean, do you have any idea how lucky a loser like you is to even be considered for a position like this?"

"Oh god. You heard that, huh?" Tim hesitates. "It's just—not that I'm not grateful or anything, I—"

"—have cold feet. I get it. This place is a ladder and everyone and their mother is trying to score a win." There's a hand on Tim's shoulder. He starts. "But please, I'm not after your frickin' kidneys, kid. It's much more cost-effective to have the nerds down in R&D cook them up from scratch."

"That's good to know... I guess."

"Then why don't we start over?" Jack returns to his throne and his co-workers talk amongst themselves in muted tones. "You seem nervous. Are you nervous? You want some water? Doc, get the kid some water."

A pair of gloved hands him a cup. He takes steady sips with unsteady fingers and the station spins on its axis. His head is a carousel and the ceiling becomes the floor. Jack is a disembodied voice that tolls like a funeral bell, cradling his head as it tells him to count back from ten.

His dream smells sharp like ethyl alcohol and something styptic. It's all metal: the enamelled steel against his back, the raking of instruments too close to his face and the voice that asks for a scalpel.

Tim's eyelashes are tacky with glue and when he tells his body to sit up, it doesn't listen. He tries to scream but he can't make a noise around the tube snaking its way down his throat. He cries for his mom but his tear ducts are busted like the rest of him. His lungs are a bellows. Seven measured breaths a minute and their charity is bled dry. He didn't know fires could burn without oxygen.

His heart breedles a lullaby that swells by the minute but they don't let him sleep. Each beep marks a part of him stolen. His treacherous body lies there and lets them leave holes. Suffocation is his first lesson in grit and endurance. They cath him when he makes a mess of the table trying to let them know he's awake.

In recovery, his world becomes four white walls, the bite of a balance scale against the soles of his feet and fresh ligatures whenever he scratches. The days meld into each other, thanks, in part, to the cocktail of painkillers and the experimental quote, unquote, post-traumatic stress therapy that's always too far out of reach. He knows that his name is Jack and that his home is Med Chamber Seven. Doc makes him recite his lines on the hour, every hour. He is kind enough to fill him in on the rest.

The person who teaches him how to stand, how to walk and how to tie his shoelaces behaves more like his old drama coach than a physio. Shoulders back, stance wide, palms up. He finds it easier to observe Jack like a novelist, make like he's learning the foibles of a character in one of his books or a bit part in one of the drama soc's productions. 

As soon as he can walk unaided, the bandages come off and he's released to Jack's custody to carry out the rest of his twenty year sentence. Jack lives in the apex of the station in an open-plan castle of rosewood and wenge and gold. He contrives a godawful ribbon cutting ceremony and insists that Tim christen his new thumbprint by unlocking the door to the apartment himself. He daubs sweat on the lock.

Tim stands on the threshold of Jack's den of iniquity. There's a fresh ache at the back of his eyes as he discerns, with a quiet ire, that he could fit his mom's house in there ten times over. Jacks slaps him on the back and brings him crashing back into reality.

"Make yourself at home, kid. I'd give you the grand tour but there isn't much to see. Bedroom, kitchen, the john's that way."

Tim roams the breadth of his enclosure. He finds himself by the window that overlooks Jack's terrace, feeling like a spaceman from a movie—stuck on some far-flung planet, regarding his homeworld with abject melancholy. This whole ordeal has left him non-partisan. He doesn't answer to his lung or his ribs or his spine. Only to Jack.

A sudden pressure gradient has never been so enticing. Jack is nosedeep in his minibar. So he lingers by the airlock, regarding the spherical dust bowl that he'll come to inherit and the contours of his new face. He'd met it prematurely in a spoonful of diluted hospital-grade jelly and his heart had raced with a violence. They put an end to his theatrics with sedatives, not answers. And when he woke up, they talked him through it delicately like they were leading him blind through a minefield. Like he were a child.

Now he understands that there are incendiaries in his veins. He only has to slip up once. He wants to go home but he wears a johnny, not a spacesuit and home is a place he can't call to mind. He'd know it if he saw it, know it by the feel of the musty air and the boards of the window shutters. Jack doesn't even have curtains.

"Uh, Jack, what is it we do, exactly?" Tim asks, then flinches. Filler is anathema to him (there's an "um" or an "uh" to ruffle every one of Jack's feathers).

"Construction, mostly. Y'know, uh. Computer stuff, general maintenance, yadda yadda yadda." It's wet with euphemism. Jack didn't earn his floor-to-ceiling windows by partaking of the sights. "Why'd you ask?"

"That's one hell of a view is all."

"Aint it?" Jack swills his mouth out. Whatever he's drinking is amber-coloured and he has it on the rocks. "She's dying, though. Bandit bastards are burning her to the ground. We gotta save her, gotta bring her into the future." Jack squeezes his shoulder like a doting father. In time, there is always a hand curling around his waist, his arm, his neck. His apartment is boundless but he still encroaches in Tim's space. Tim figures there's a price for that, too.

"You'll see." There's a warmth about him that dispels in a second—like a drop of blood in a puddle. "You and me are gonna do great things together."

Jack sinks into his sofa—a sleek leather thing that maintains presence—drinking all the while. He posits a rambling, garbled toast to progress and friendship without extending his to Tim. He simply offers up the ice cubes. Tim humours him. He stands there as they melt in his mouth, unsure of what to do with his arms or the backwash and diluted gin. As Jack moves onto the bottle, he covets a real sip and some sleeves to fiddle with.

"Clothes are on the dresser," Jack barks eventually, having grown weary of Tim loitering in his hospital gown like a cumbersome sickhouse ghost.

There had been no need to change. A machine straight out of comic book had transported them from the medbay straight to Jack's apartment. He was too caught up in mirroring Jack's posture to consider the yellow tread socks or his bare ass. Tim feels Jack's hot stare against the back of his haunches as he trudges to the bedroom.

Jack sleeps in an Italian triple king. There's something unjust about its size and softness. He'll come to find it unjust that Jack sleeps like a baby. Tim is a geological force as he bowls into it. It's like laying on a cloud after weeks trapped in a cot of foam and air. He could never relax enough to sleep, between the ubiquitous white lighting and the pressed faces that would filter through every two hours to rotate him like a carcass on a spit. Not until they made him.

His knees are flush against his chest as he considers the clothes that sit atop the dresser like a threat. They're yellow—such an absurdly natural and happy colour; defaced forever like all that Jack touches. Yellow like a daffodil, like the sun, like his mother's hair. Yellow for the better part of a life soused with wanderlust. All he wants is to go home and bury himself in his mother's arms, a polychrest remedy for all of his ills.

There's a washboard stomach beneath his binder. He removes it only to shower. There's something voyeuristic about peeking, so he doesn't. But he's seen the yellow bruises. He dries his hair on his sick person's uniform and pulls on Jack's clothes: a sweatshirt in shreds with orchestrated sentiment and a pair of loud boots. They fit him like like a cadaver skin. He takes in the length of his person for the first time; his inorganic niceties and his perfect teeth. Then he goes postal, knobs his knuckles until they are bloody and spalled like the fragments of looking glass. Jack enters without knocking and regards him like a groom seeing his bride for the first time. Tim shrinks, for fear of Jack doing to his face what he did to his mirror and his brand new fingers.

Jack simply removes an imaginary hair from the lapel of Tim's jacket and says, all teeth, "oh, kiddo, get a load of you."

The following morning, Tim has a tummy ache. He sits at the island, his hand in a bandage and Jack's bathrobe swallowing him whole. He's handed a coffee. Black. The way Jack likes it. Tim was always more of a cocoa drinker. A stranger watches behind the dark eddy in the cup. The storm that the doctors had been intravenously tempering resurfaces. It engulfs him so quickly he can't claw it out of his throat. But he tries. He tries until he is bent over, heaving in breaths and willing reality to stop.

All Tim needs is space. And they're floating in it.

Instead, Jack calls Autohn up to his suite and gives him an earful about daring to discharge his pet project with a knot in his stomach, after all the money Jack sank into him. Autohn passes the buck, blames Tim and his height and his scant paperwork. Tim is laid out on a reclining chair and asked blunt questions about his sleep pattern and his libido and his appetite. When all he can talk about is Jack's gallantry, Autohn listens to his fledgling heart and calls it compulsive and recurrent. Tim could have saved him the trouble. He is prescribed a small dispensary to take at breakfast alongside the coffee that Jack drinks black.

Breakfast is the same as dinner: three quarts formula, one quart milk to make him four quarts Jack. Tim doesn't take lunch. Letting the granules bead up over the top of the spoon is a cardinal sin so Jack taps off the excess like flakes of moth dust. Jack makes redress for his empty stomach with his platinum credit cards. Tim purchases things he could only ever dream of: champagne and vestments and complicated canapés, if only to look at them. They'll make for more than eye candy with time, when he'll use them to cater to Aurelia's affluent tastes as he insists he ate earlier.

The only solid he is fed is a load about Jack's humble beginnings and a some select feats of valour. Jack is a hero, spinning his story as it unravels like a golden twine.

Before he met Jack, the devil had horns and a tail. Now, the devil talks in his sleep, spits the hypocoristic like nursery rhymes—sweetheart, honey, baby girl, angel, angel, always angel. There's a tan line around his fourth finger and a picture of a young child on his desk. Jack dresses like he is out at the elbows in a threadbare sweatshirt but lives on the pages of a luxury magazine. He is a kitchen drawer with a lock; a closely guarded man of sentiment, oxymoronic to a fault. He is an engineer (at least on paper) yet he lives off the fat of the code he sows—but he's always colluding with the intermediate management and coming home with flecks of blood on his boots. Tim knows better than to ask.

Jack doesn't ask questions. He doesn't care to learn the reason he cries at night (he just tells him to quit it so he can sleep). He doesn't ask questions when Tim pursues his throat with his fingertips, either. He just calls him baby from the other side of the bathroom door and waits for him to turn himself rightside up. Sometimes Jack waits with water. Sometimes he peppers his forehead with kisses. But he always seethes at the slight to his authority, the slight to his gut. Tim's a dog on a choke chain. And Jack teaches him to fear the sight of it.

It starts as an undertone. It gets worse with a defiant shock of hair. Tim has meetings to attend (the boring, administrative type that Jack hates) and his fringe is stood stanchion like that of a corpse, lost deep in the bowels of space. There's the dregs of waking up on a Sunday; far too early for mass at noon. He's wearing his hand-me-down finery and his father's too-big leather shoes. His mother makes a meal of his hair.

A deadline has kept Jack up all night and his patience is shot. Coaching Tim through it grows old real fast so Jack takes a more proactive approach and gussies him up himself. He goes ham with a comb and some hairspray and Tim swears if Jack gets any rougher, he'll hear the sutures along his hairline pop.

Jack tells him "god, it's like you're trying to send me crazy!" And Tim laughs, for lack of a riposte. The smack that follows is so sudden and hard it turns his head around. Jack says he was asking for it as he leaves him twitching on the tiles. The spools of floorplans he comes home with that night keep him so occupied that he hasn't the time to apologise around the bruise purpling on Tim's face. 

Jack is heterochromatic, sunshine and clouds. His moods change faster than he can spend his money. He can be a private archipelago, cool and romantic. He can be a raging tempest, decimating anything in his path. Or he can be an afterglow and that's the the sting of it—to stand in the debris and pretend. In the coming months, he'll learn to live with Jack's histrionics and his hair-trigger temper. Tim feels like an elastic band that will snap if he moves the wrong way. So he adjusts to his new face and his new name and his new cock. He learns to make himself smaller when he needs to, and bigger when the job demands it. He grows tired, more complacent.

Three weeks before Zarpedon infiltrates Helios, Jack introduces Tim to Athena—a merc he hired to harden his edges. They call her the gladiator. She has a classic face but wears a scowl and the black look of a Pandoran duenna: hard-bitten by a thousand battles.

Tim offers her his hand. She offers him a foot to his gut. "Keep your guard up," she tells him, as he pitches from the impact. "Or they'll eat you alive down there."

Athena develops a regime to build his stamina. It becomes his preferred mode of martyrdom. He's always the wrong side of 160 pounds. He runs with tender shins until the tank that drives his legs is empty. When they give way, he takes a cold shower and let the shivers trim the excess.

His closest friends are two stubborn pounds that linger like a fatty disease. Jack's solution is to hew a hole in Tim's stomach that he fills with gallons of water. He immerses him in a bath so hot he has to inch his way into it. After ten minutes, Tim's body feels like one big pulse. When his eyes roll, he tries to grope his way out but Jack's hands are trained on his throat.

Jack holds him captive in that porcelain cell for hours, diligently nursing him with scalding water and slaps to the face when he lapses into unconsciousness. When Tim begs Jack to wringe him out for fear of atrophy, of his blood clotting, Jack simply props his feet up and says "not now, baby, not when you're doing so well." Coming around feels like heavy labour. Towels and sweat swathe him like a shroud. Jack pulls parts of him, tells tall tales of how he collapsed in the shower like a featherweight. The irony of it stings. Tim never loses the surplus avoirdupois.

Still, Athena beats a backbone into him. He takes his sessions in a room that stinks of sweat. They are as intense as a high speed dance and—if anything—permission to let some of his newfound testosterone go. Athena teaches him how to deflect a punch and how to ram his knee up into a rib cage. She floors him like a shoulder. When he spits blood against the rubber mats, she shows no mercy. She simply tells him to get back up again.

Jack's graduation present is a Devigorator. It's an old-school Hyperion pistol with a stolen barrel and a physical presence. Tim is catatonic as Athena coaches him on how to load up a magazine. He hasn't so much as held a gun before let alone shot one.

Athena is riveted to his shoulders as she veers him towards the target. She angles his body so he aims down the sights. "Breathe, Jack," she says. He disregards her advice as always, takes up the slack in the trigger and pulls. One, twice. There's a burst of air, a sweet kick to his wrist and the smell of cordite. The first misses the target but hits the paper. The second pierces its genderless crotch.

When he can shoot cleanly, Jack acquaints him with a Bane and an Actualizer. Down in R&D, they fire at purple squash plants to observe the various exit wounds the elementals can inflict. When Athena switches the target sheet out for a midget psycho that pleads, with raucous voice, for its wretch of a life, he ducks out of the firing range and fetches clear water up all over Jack's shoes.

By the time Jack strong-arms him back in, pea-green to the hilt, Athena has already finished the job. Turns out it's easier to make holes of its eyeballs when it isn't screaming.


	2. elpis

Athena delivers a sermon about anticipating the recoil and Tim hangs upon her every word like a miscreant. He lets every remark water the seed of doubt inside him. After a lengthy session, his mind comes crawling like a bowed down dog. When his fusillade of pellets fells everything but the target, the anxiety he had banged up in his stomach decamps through his tear ducts and the bars of his teeth.

"Pathetic." The swordplayer frowns as he chases his breath, bringing him ploughing back into himself with a quick jab to his kidneys. Tim doubles over with a grunt like a bullet-bitten Cryo Vine, miserably inadequate and sobbing pathetically. "What's gotten into you?"

"'m sorry, Athena. It's just—I feel like I'm never going to get the hang of this, y'know?" Tim's voice cracks like mud in The Dust. "I'm not cut out for this. I'm no good. I'm trying but—"

"Then try _harder._  I hate excuses but not as much as I hate quitters. You're my mission," Athena says bluntly, emptying the magazine of the SMG. "And I never leave a mission incomplete. So dry your eyes and suck it up, Jack."

Tim blots his face on his sleeve and swallows in an attempt to dampen his dry mouth. He is hungry enough to partake of the metal if Athena would let him to himself. Instead, she uses the toe of her boot to bend his leg at the knee.

"This time, don't flinch," Athena bids. "It's only a gun. When you allow it so much power over you, you're playing right into the enemy's hands. Remember to breathe."

The target's curlicue face gyres like his guts. So he unfurls it, gives it mismatched eyes, takes a deep breath and shoots Jack straight through his teeth. He smacks the bullseye. Athena's face hardens with pride's lesser cousin.

Athena slaps him on the back for a job well done and hits the showers. Jack meets Tim in the range. He claps a watch on Tim's wrist like a shackle and orders a Loader to shoot rubber bullets at his feet. Tim jerks back with a horror as two apparitions leap out of the watch like a thunder. The digistructs spout hokey catchphrases as they reduce the robot to a pile of shrapnel. He'll come to know their repertory soon enough. With Jack's delusion of grandeur, Tim half-expects them to don tights and a cape. But like Tim, the digistructs are Jack's spitting image because that's how he sees himself: a hero, with all the valiant acts and fine qualities that accompany it. With an ego as fat as a bloodwing bound for pâté, there's no room for introspection or subtlety.

In grade school, an assignment had asked him what a hero looks like. He'd got a big, fat A for his essay that had waxed lyrical about his single mom and how she'd taught him to laugh, to stay humble and—above all else—be good. He's can't call her idiosyncrasies to mind, but he remembers how her voice had sang with pride. He hears her heartache every night as he lies awake in Jack's bed. Jack calls it self-deception. He loves to talk about how oxygen-rich her air was as his best suits delivered the death notice, how she doesn't burn candles for him. It's his favourite bedtime story because it's the one that makes Tim come apart like a sweater string.

Jack collects Vault Hunters like teacups. Tim's team comprises a Fragtrap, a gunslinging jurist, a man all metal and a baroness who spends money like water. It has the makings of a sitcom with more ichor. He grows balls real fast when the Lost Legion work their way through the cracks in Helios' defences like stealth missiles. Turns out fear is a better motivator than money. He supposes it's as good an icebreaker as any.

Jack pretends they're strangers and before he knows it, they're piggybacking on a moonshot to Elpis and choking on the absence of air. Nobody bags him this time. His eyeballs would have ruptured like grapes in a microwave were it not for Athena's manhandling and Springs' resourcefulness. As they catnap midcycle in some vacant bandit hold, he'll tell his ECHOlog all he's come to know: that Nisha is an asphyxiophiliac, that Pandora's moon has less atmosphere than a slow Sunday in the Outlands and that he takes to Springs like a big sister.

Nisha seems to like him a whole lot (his face, at least) but she has a palpable dislike of other women's company. She and Wilhelm are in some sort of cahoots, brothers in bloody arms. She slaps at her holster whenever Springs opens her mouth, and they exchange laughs at Tim's anxious pallor. Springs is an acquired taste but she doesn't deserve to die for it. She is matter-of-fact, hypocritical and a bit of (what she'd call) a blatherskite. But she's chipper in a hail-fellow-well-met sort of way and a born storyteller. He warms up to her like the bug rolls she feeds him in her shop on Concordia over her chronicles of the Crackening and her secret of scars. They swap nightmares and run on about old books and Hyperion's turpitude and he starts to feel like himself again. He's her beta reader, wingman and unkeen listener. She's his personal agony aunt, a Carpentarian ray of sunshine, simple—like the way she reduces Athena to a lovelorn violet. Athena's softer side soon grows on him.

Plugging turrets is plain sailing. Rathyds and threshers and torks, too—they're toxic and incendiary, claws and mandibles. It's easier to pick off things that aren't tiny and twee, that don't speak his language. He is happiest leaving that to the rest of his team and the digistructs. Tim will kill for all manner of things in due course. Bullets, territory, booze. To watch the twin projectiles of a Blowfly turn a man's leg into cheese. But the first time it bears down on him, hard.

The mission is almost negligible. It's an errand, really. But Athena needs the money and Nisha needs the target practice (this is the first time she lies to him, no honour among thieves). He shoots the guy cleanly, straight through the skull. Then he's strung out behind a storage container being yelled at to shoot. And he's strung out again later, when Athena digs a bullet out of his leg with the business end of a spoon.

"This quarter is lawless, anarchic," she tells him around his sniffling, fashioning his belt into a gag that she forces between his teeth. "Either your ethos dies or you do." Nisha smiles broadly around her hip flask, liquor playing like bad ideas on her tongue.

The dead hatchet man isn't his only first, either. One night, Moxxi catches his eye over debrief drinks and tugs him away from his Vault Hunter friends and up and over the Up Over. She has him by the collar like some lovesick puppy. The other bar patrons make like they aren't jealous (and they're so very jealous). For the first time in Tim's life, somebody wants to be him. He feels like a king. At least until they're in her apartment above the bar. Moxxi gives him the show-me-around and she's so close he can feel her body heat seeping through her corset. She smells like a table wine and—god, she's old enough to be his mother.

"We feeling a little nervous, sugar?" she asks coquettishly, touching him through the crotch of his jeans, the esse of her skin like smoke in the air.

"Terrified, actually, ma'am."

After an excruciatingly long moment of mediation, Moxxi gives a half-cowed laugh. "That's real cute," she decides. Only, Tim doesn't want to be nervous or cute. He wants to be charismatic and romantic but he's neither of those things and more than a little light-headed.

"This is kinda messed up," he manages.

"What is?"

"You know all these things and I don't."

"You don't know them _yet—"_ Moxxi chides, pressing the whorl of her index finger against his upper lip. Her nails are painted claret, like the surgeon's had been. She's intoxicating—the dimples of her back, the things she does with her hands and the way her nipples rub over his skin when she arches against his chest.

"Y'know, Jack," she tells him fifteen minutes later as he pulls on his socks, red as the rouge she reapplies, "I hate guys that go on for too long. I get so bored." Tim isn't anything in particular to her. The answer to a burning question. Another name for her little black book. It's strictly territorial but he falls a little bit in love with her anyway.

Initially, he refuses to die on Elpis because he is young and callow and Jack has him caged like an animal, roaming the steel walls of his pride. He wears denial like a bandage. He has a boyish fear of his own mortality and of bleeding out with moon dust in his lungs and no air to carry his screams home.

Tim's soft centre meant he was never a candidate for survival. But time deadens him to the Pandoran quarter, to shame, to the horrible things Jack made him do. Felicity. The wounded Lost Legion soldier. The bloodstains from R&D. The defector he helped Jack to shoot into space for kicks. He could plot his decline like a map if he wanted to. A list of his wrongs to gift to his maker and save him the trouble. Still, he lives with himself. Once, he was an unwilling participant in all of this. Now he knows better. It doesn't matter that he didn't bask in the horror, that those weren't his fingers on the trigger, his bloody hands. God knows he is as culpable as the rest of them. He'd given his objections voice but the once and lost a tooth in the process.

That's why he makes his peace with dying in Elpis' core as he walks into the Vault's hungry mouth. He embraces death with a quiet dignity like a gladiator. A unsung end like Jack wanted. His obituary would laud him as a hero in little gold letters. They'd burn him and and erect a tower on a headland in his honour. But Jack was never one for subtlety.

Eridian tech changes the seeker. It is an inscrutable chest, the Holy Grail, the big cheese. It spun him a prophecy as certain as time and Jack listened. The last time Tim saw Jack, he was catatonic, something ugly playing on his face like a disease. It was what Jack deserved. He'd be lying if he said he hadn't delighted in it, hadn't wished he was the lucky bastard that got to be the catalyst, to punch the Vault relic into his contemptible face. At least then he wouldn't have be written out of the narrative. Tim had spat in his eyes and hoped he stayed that way forever.

But Jack doesn't die and neither does Tim. The Sentinel does. Athena dusts herself off and walks away. The heiress goes back to her castle and her boundless fortune. CL4P-TP is, thankfully, stripped to its brass tacks. Jack's laugh tolls through the Vault long after the med team peel him from his throne. Three of them remain. They settle into a weird in-between space. They're in the maelstrom of history; a place where Handsome Jack doesn't exist and time flows with deliberate unpredictability.

But Jack is a tide. An echo. A villain from one of Tim's comic books. He always comes back.

For a while, Tim is his own. His body swells with agency. He steals away, swims in Jack's bed and chews through the ECHOnet's library like a lunatic. He reads things that titillate, things that bore, thing that engage, things that shock. He gorges himself like a creature who feeds exclusively on sugar and words. He reads in the bath. He reads on the can. He reads in Jack's spacefront balcony. He reads anything he can get Jack's hands on and then some. It's a religious experience, an engagement with the person he used to be. After one cycle, he's too busy reading to take his shake, to work out, to sleep, to take his meds.

And suddenly, reading isn't enough. A dead man wants to fill the time with words, pen a page-turner by virtue of its plot twists and witticisms. He lets his imagination take him to faraway places where he is the king of his small universe (not a bit part) filling someone else's shoes of his own volition. There's no shiver in his lungs, no shaking hands, just the things he wants to say and the means in which to says them.

He bleeds in words.

He writes like he has an unfinished memoir and a terminal illness. He writes of knights and paladins, the sort of men that possess a gallantry and bravery he always lacked. He writes at a speed so acute the keys bruise his fingertips, until he is sure his fingers are bleeding. Then he thinks about his breathing spell manifesting on his browsing history like a stain. His breath hits the roof of his mouth and stays there. Later, he vomits it all up. He orders an ION Loader to Jack's apartment, watches it fry the tablet like an egg and wishes he was brave enough to order it to shoot.

Two cycles turn into three then four and he isn't sure what to do with himself. He fears Jack will never come back and he'll collapse without direction. He won't know how to breathe, how to talk, how to move. Maybe Jack wants him comatose too. Twin vegetables. He's the one they'll stuff and stick in his office.

After six cycles, he finds Nisha in Jack's front room like a gift from the Fairy of Unwelcome Visitors. She bestrides a footstool like a bronco with all the subtlety of a BUL Loader. Her fly is down, her bra off and her lipstick smudged like blood around her mouth.

"S'up, Jack," she says around a drawn-out breath, teeth digging white pits in her bottom lip. He wishes he'd bothered with pants.

"Oh my god." Tim turns a steep red, hurriedly fashioning one of Jack's bullymong furs around his waist. "What the actual hell, Nisha?"

"Nothing I haven't seen before, pretty boy." She preens in Jack's cabinet, scrubs lacquer from her canines.

"Ever heard of knocking? I'm not decent."

"You look perfectly decent to me." Her gaze doesn't meet his eyes or his greasy hair, just the line of his hips. "Thought I'd surprise you but I'll make an appointment next time."

"I don't recall asking but uh, thanks. You can't just let yourself in like that."

"Why not, guy?" She grins from ear to ear like a jackal that found a rabbit in its lair. "Jack put my print on the lock, didn't he?"

"For the sake of my sanity and because it's not your apartment."

"It's not yours either."

"What do you want?"

"A little company. A little fun. Some skag-killin’ time. The quiet is deafening. I'm starting to think. I hate when that happens. Sometimes a girl need a distraction. I'm easy. You wanna play?"

"Answer's no." Tim sinks into the sofa like a deflating balloon. Legally, he's thirty something but his body is twenty-six and he feels fucking ancient. She works her way over and straddles his lap, one leg on either side of his with an ease, like she belongs there. "I'm real tired, sheriff."

They look good together. In another life, they would have a meetcute story about an spaceport or a coffee shop, if he were brave and she weren't a violent sociopath that would gut him for kicks. But he could never talk to girls (or boys, for that matter). He could never speak without his voice shaking.

"I don't want to hear it. You promised me a drink, Jack. I suggest you make good on it."

"And if I don't?"

"Oh, you got a real sharp tongue when daddy's not around." She takes him by the throat, then. "I feel like cutting it out and feeding it to you."

"Go for it."

"Nah. I'm not a charity. Get dressed."

An hour later and they're in a bar deep in Helios' guts and they've slugged one and a half bottles between the three of them. They look out of place amongst the suits and ties but Tim doesn't care because Nisha kept their glasses topped up on bad intentions. Tim's addled brain can't remember what they've been drinking or what they're meant to be celebrating but he knows it's sparkling and very expensive. Tim can spend money like a drunken Dahlsman and he feels no better for it.

His gastric juices twinge with the bastard child of peer pressure and friendlessness. Nisha's edges make him pine for Springs' gentle bellyaching, Athena's quiet presence and the way the girls would spat over nothing like a pack of rabid baboons. Tim sucks on the ice cubes and thinks of Aurelia, her strident flirtations and the whites of her eyes.

If he'd have thrown in the sponge, he'd be browning in front of a fireplace off Hermes, contractually obliged to lick somebody else's boots. Jack had his contracts airtight like his whys and wherefores. He knew no loopholes and let-out clauses. Like her diamonds or her cashmere, the Hammerlock's mad Mammon could ensure Aurelia the best lawyers in the galaxy and a pen of gold leaf to sign the little dotted line.

In the back of his mind, Tim knew it was a joke, a lazy line, quaint whimsy for a spoiled girl with field sports in her blood. But in a world where all that he is is the property of another, he knows the the power in saying no. Aurelia had clucked her tongue and puffed out her chest because she wasn't used to the word. She had told him over soda pops (delightfully toytown for a girl that drinks imported holy water from Athenas) that she always makes good on her promises. Pretty words for a game bird.

Besides, she'd tire of him soon enough, taxidermise him and hang him with her brother'spelts in the sweeping corridors of his quarters. But at least he'd die warm. Right now, Tim's belly is full of air. He's suspended in the boundary between Elpis' atmosphere and outer space with the stars in his ears. He is weightless. He is adrift. He is free. He never wants to touch the ground again.

Jack never lets him drink for fear of his loose tongue and what it will do to his abs. But Jack's more insensate than usual, hedged in a bed down in Medical; and Tim's too busy trying not to vomit to count the empty calories or think about what Jack will do when he sees his distended stomach. He thinks of Moxxi alone backstage, removing her makeup, of the bondservant painting Aurelia's toenails in her Hermian schloss, of Athena and Springs exchanging sweet nothings on a nearby shell hole and wishes he were anywhere else but here.

Tim hasn't swallowed his champagne before Nisha is rotating stiff drinks. She doubles up the vodka in his Hot Gazpacho but the fresh rush of nausea as Wilhelm slaps him on the back holds all his attention.

"Guys, we got all night. Can we slow down a little?"

"No way, Jackie. You're just warming up."

"Yeah, what's stopping you?" Nisha's arms are coiled around his neck and he supposes he will kiss her when he figures out which way is up. "You got the big cojones you always wanted, Jack."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"That I know you what you can handle." She has him down to a science, apparently.

"This is a lot of cocktails by anyone's standard, Nish."

"And we're cooking 'em up just for you. Wilhelm's idea. We're gonna name 'em after every girl that wouldn't fuck you. They're birthday presents."

"It's... it's not my birthday." Tim imagines a cake; four tiers tall, all carbs and sugars. "My birthday's the uh... I don't remember right now. But I'm a Scorpio."

"Of course you are."

"We have a certain magnetic charm."

The enforcer's laugh is jarring, a noise that should come from a machine. Between the lights and the alcohol, Wilhelm looks even bigger somehow, like he could crush him with his pinkie finger. His eyes are wandering and the train of thought that explains why left the station three drinks ago.

"Whatever you say, Timothy Lawrence."

It's the first time he's heard his name in months. Jack had burned it along with his birth certificate and the clothes he wore. Five syllables and he's crashing back into Jack's body like a comet, pounding on the bars of his ribcage. Nisha smiles like a lioness because she has him right where she wants him. She likes to watch him squirm.

There's things he's forgotten. The colour of his eyes. His mother's name. The name of the place he was born. Whether he had siblings. The past is hard to traverse. With time, it grows onerous. They made sure of that, between the narcotics and the therapy. For the most part, he's glad he doesn't remember. If he remembers, he remembers that he's lonely, subhuman. It's better that way. Less painful. Less messy. Jack's nuances, his crevices are all he needs.

But his name? He clings to that like a piece of bloody sinew. It dissolves like salt in Nisha's mouth and he spills aniseed down his front. She laughs, nice and loud and hollow.

"How?" Tim splutters, eloquence gone with the drinks. He bites back the need to choke.

"You're not the only one who's been doing a little bedtime reading. I've been keeping tabs for my old man while he's away."

"What do you know, Nisha?"

"Everything." Tim's heart makes a home for itself in his throat. "I know everything."

"You can't have. It's gone. Jack destroyed it. He told me."

"Uh-uh. You should know by now that Jack's hardly a man of his word. You might not exist on paper. But you're in the system, babe." That's a very important distinction to make. "Best kept secret this side of the galaxy. Your vital records, your paycheck stubs, your porn history, some friggin' desperate blog posts. All there."

She once struck fear into the heart of him but now it is an old song, par for the course. This is part of the game they never stop playing.

"Show me, Nisha. Please. You have got to show me."

"I don't have to do anything. But maybe I'll reconsider if you get down on your knees and beg. That'd really get my rocks off."

"You're twisted."

"She's serious."

He has no pride left to swallow. Jack stole it with the rest of him. And before he reason to think, he's grovelling like a worm on the floor of the bar. Helios' liveware is staring and the two of them laugh with an edge so sharp he could cut himself with it. And through the haze of the drink, he realises Nisha never intended to show him in the first place.

That's when Wilhelm kisses him. There's no romance. No flowers. It's a mouth fuck. He doesn't remember what happens between then and getting back to the apartment. Just the hint of a bottle on his lips and the grind of denim against denim. When Tim tries to move Wilhelm pins him down with a forearm across the neck. He fumbles in his pocket. There's a crinkle of plastic. Nisha orchestrates the scene like a ringmaster. She tells Wilhelm not to bother, to throw caution to the wind. Like that's her call to make.

Tim lets his jeans be shoved down, lets himself be rolled over because maybe then they'll give him what he wants. Wilhelm pushes him down into the floor so that he has to shove back. The noises he makes are nothing to them. They move in separate timing, so drunk that they can't sync up. Wilhelm finishes with a contained moan and Tim doesn't remember the rest.

What he remembers is begging for answers. Nisha thinks he is begging for more. Wilhelm leaves him panting on the floor while his bruises develop and doesn't look him in the eye. He takes a piss, doesn't wash his hands then leaves. Tim closes his eyes and when he opens them, he's staring up at Jack's ceiling. Nisha's breasts eclipse the lights. She presses a glass to his lips in uncharacteristic moment of softness and he jerks back.

"No." Tears bead on his eyelashes. "God, no. No more."

"Relax, mama's boy. It's only water." Water on Helios is sanguine and tinny because there's blood in the pipes but his throat is dry and he wolfs it down without hesitation. "Easy."

She lets him hold her afterwards. She never returns the sentiment or talks about what happened, just waits quietly until he stops crying and removes himself from her.

Tim crosses the expanse with no feeling in his legs and a shame he can't place weighing him down. He roots around Jack's drawers and pulls out a pair of jeans he bought with Jack’s card. They're understated. Black, some other man’s size with no belt loops. That way nobody could hook their fingers through and lead him astray. He can't fit his leg through, no matter how hard he pinches his skin.

Another cycle comes and goes. Jack makes a dramatic entrance like a returning king. Tassiter's corpse isn't cold before he gives Wilhelm a new body. Tim wishes he were so lucky. He gives Nisha a ring with a big, fat blood diamond. When she declines, he names a town after her. Tim forgets all about his present until Meg calls him up to Jack's office.

Jack's new office is as hot as an Immolator sett back on Crisis Scar. Tim is sweating like a cut pig by the time he climbs up to the tier. He tosses his jacket on Jack's desk. Jack stands with his back to him, stance as wide as a seasoned cosmonaut's. Nisha hangs off Jack's arm like some half-hitch lamprey, a jawless smile snapping into place as she sees Tim approach.

"Oh!" She gasps. "Look who came to play." Tim feels sick for looking at her.

Jack turns on his laurels and Tim's throat buzzes like a cloud of varkids in a desert heat. Nisha had warned him about the mask ("can't pretend I don't like it", she'd said) but nothing could have prepared him for the imitation Frankenstein's monster that became of Jack's face. The bolts are clasped so tight Tim can hear the purposeful thrumming of Jack's blood from where he stands. His stomach is all acid.

"Well, if it isn't my second favourite one of me." Jack's voice is two octaves too high, like he's a mild inconvenience away from a hysterical outburst. "How's it going, buddy?"

"I uh, like what you've done with the place, boss," Tim says with a watery smile.

"She's a beaut, aint she? Been real busy reworking the whole corporate image. That's kinda what this lil one-to-one is about, actually."

Before Tim can react, there are two pounds of steel forcing his wrists behind his back and a woman with half his height and double his give hustling him into a chair. Naive of him to think the cuffs at her belt were esthetical. Or sexy. Nisha is a dead weight on his lap, immovable as Mount Hellsfont. She slides her hands down his hips, then under his shirt and up around the bruises scalloping his ribcage. Something lives and writhes in his gut.

"I'm glad you enjoyed your little vacation, cupcake. But playtime is over. Gotta whip the ship into shape, y'know? Make some examples."

Jack ransacks his desk with a mania and pulls out a blowtorch and a strut that branches into an uncomfortably familiar insignia. The ire on Jack's new Plasticine face—the kind he learnt directly from his grandmother's knee—tells him he's about to become even more familiar with it. The torch crackles to life and his mind flits to Springs and the scar climbing up her stomach like a Necrophage. 

"Oh god. Jack? what the hell is that?" Tim asks, hands clammy and white-knuckled. He knows the answer already.

"Consider this," Jack says as he turns the instrument over in his hand, "a kind of character building exercise. About time we put some hairs on your chest."

"Oh, god. Please, Jack, please," Tim starts, voice lowered to a whisper. But he can't appeal to reason. Reason died back in the Vault with the guardians and his freedom. Jack's body is possessed by a force of will that Tim only snatched glimpses of before. It's bigger than the Vault. It's bigger than Pandora. It's bigger than all of them. It knows no mercy, only what it wants and what it will do in order to achieve it. Pandora will bear witness to all of it. Tim sobs.

"Told you he'd cry."

"Aw, come on, kid. Cut the waterworks. You're making me look bad." Nisha's hands are a vice around his chin and Jack's face is so close. "What, are you? Five?"

"You don't have to do this."

"See, that's the thing—I do. I gotta make you see. I gotta give you a little taste of what those bastards put me through. So, listen up, champ because here's the kicker: I need you to keep those pretty eyes of yours open."

In the offing, in an Atlas encampment above Overlook, when time and rotgut have obscured the lines of Jack's face, he'll remember him as a smack of iron on his tongue. He'll remember Nisha's clownwide smile as the last he saw with two eyes. He'll remember the sweat. The pleading. The white heat before the brand makes contact with his face. The way a symphony of pain rips through the plastic nerve endings like a gunshot. He'll remember screaming so loud he could wake the entire universe up.

Jack pushes a button that summons somebody to his office. They peel his eyelid back like a can of skag meat. There is an oversized needle. Nisha makes fists of his hair. Jack and a host of quacks hold a conversation about him over him. When it proves too difficult to navigate the disfigured landscape of his face with a plastic tongue, he strips his lips of their skin. Sleep is a temptress. He lets her claim him. When he wakes up, he has one blue eye and a transparent plastic shell where the green one should be. Athena sits at the bedside like his sullen guardian angel. She applies a polish to what is left of his brittle fingernails. For all her concentration, she does a real sloppy job. He clucks his tongue and turns to greet her but his mouth is full of cotton.

He thought she had left.

He traces the line of her arm up to his wrist, to a set of leather restraints, to a hospital tag that reads a name that is not his. A sadness that was smothered by the meds rears its ugly head. A fresh thread of shame snatches it by the hand and takes flight. Before he can stop himself, he falls apart like the rest of his put-up job.

"How bad is it?" He asks without wanting to know the answer.

"If you want somebody to lie to you, I'm not the man for the job." Athena has the emotional finesse an absent mother. Still, she slips her hand over his but turns away as though she is sitting in on something private. "It is rather bad."

"The mask—" Tim's breath hitches like a kick to the gut. He skins his lips with his teeth. "Did you see it? Did you hear 'em talking? They'll have to insert bolts, won't they? I—I don't want them to. I don't want them to touch me. Please don't let them touch me, 'thena. Oh god."

They share a complete silence for a long minute like a pair of strangers. And he supposes that's all they really are.

"I'm leaving." Athena parts the heavy air with no resistance. "I'm meeting Janey planetside. Come with me, Jack."

"Where to?" A boyish part of him wants her to say "home", wants her to spirit him away and take him back to wherever it is he came from.

Only, he doesn't know where home is. Home isn't Helios. It isn't Handsome Jack's bed. Home is somewhere far offworld. Somewhere distant. Somewhere so deep in the recess of his mind that he can't put a name to it. He doesn't have a home. Not anymore. Athena doesn't either. Never did. None of them do. They're just a band of vagabonds with guns on their hips and no place to go back to. "Somewhere safe," she says. And that's good enough.

Tim sheds bitter tears because she makes it sound so simple. They smack his paper gown like raindrops and soak him to the core. He's so certain that the pain in his chest will kill him. But that's wishful thinking. He wishes Jack had left him to die but he has no largess. An Anshin could have fixed him up quick and easy. But he let it scar properly. Had to strap him down so he wouldn't pick at his property. Had to put him under and teach him a lesson about who he belongs to, about brand loyalty.

"Concordia? He'll find me," he chokes out without reason and a voice as small as he feels.

"Don't be stupid. We put some money together. Janey shut up shop. I have taken a job in a city east of The Rust Commons. The place is a Faraday cage. It's called Hollow Point. It doesn't officially exist. He won't think to look for you there."

"You don't understand. He put things in me."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"It's true." Tim can feel it rippling beneath his skin like newborn veins. In his collarbones, in his stomach, in his ribs. "Bombs. Wires. Trackers. Chips. Something."

"Dogs have chips, Jack. People get smart. Somebody put it in. That means it can be taken out."

"No, it can't. It'll scar. It'll explode. Jack—"

"Is a monster. I'm not sticking around for the fireworks and neither are you."

There's a mute pain that he doesn't register until he feels something warm running down his forearm, cloying in the hairs Jack sprinkled there. He thinks she plucked the cannula out of his arm before his mind catches up with him. Athena holds a microchip between her fingers. It's a bloody magic trick and his head swims like a summer heat.

"Here's your termination clause." She tucks it inside his pillowcase like a dirty secret. "We're getting the next shuttle out of here. We leave next sun cycle. I need you walking so rest up. I will source a body and a digistruct."

"What'll we do, Athena?"

"Whatever we need to."

"You could be a manicurist. A bad one."

"Janey's idea. She says that yellow was never your colour. That girl has her head in the clouds. Perhaps that's why the two of you get on so well." 

Tim makes a wretched noise halfway between a sob and a laugh. Athena forces a pen into his hand and with trembling fingers, he spells out his name.


	3. hollow point

Anticipation keeps Tim on the precipice of sleep, takes him by the hand and institutes a midnight tour of the no man's land between reality and the neighbouring realm of his subconscious. He runs through the badlands, pursued by a threat without a face. The moon is an eyeball, lucent in spite of it all and Jack's laugh is the stars. He is swallowed by the howling maelstrom of space and his body is never recovered. Athena bastes him with fishhooks. The stitches are so loose that the hole becomes an open house for infection and insects and the earth they throw in after him. Jack's coffin is inlaid with moonstones and diamonds. Nightmares all.

Athena makes good on her promise between hourly rounds. Come morning meds, she's lugging a dead orderly across the ward in lieu of grapes or flowers. A two beat tattoo against the poor bastard's neck and Jack's overtones take shape across his face like a living growth.

"Oh god. I wish you hadn't had bothered, Athena," Tim says as she uncouples the leather abrading his wrists. It's steeped in thanklessness despite his best efforts. Athena knows (with an incisiveness beat into her) that he's talking about the body and the empty space where its wife, its husband, its kids should be. Tim is a wordsmith by nature, afflicted with a need to seek story everywhere. Collateral damage is a tough pill to swallow. But Tim has gotten real good at taking his medication and as with everything, it's best not to think about it.

"Hyperion scum, the lot of them." Athena bandages the corpse in its funeral shroud, using Tim's face as a reference. He wants to importune her with questions. But the ones he (or rather, the analgesic) asks are "What about us? What about Atlas?" Athena spits. "That's different," she says. It's different.

When his body denies him the quiet dignity of steady hands, Athena helps him out of his wiring and the gauzy penal garb and into the uniform of a man who may or may not have had a family. She works, like all else, with subjectivity in absentia. When the drugs open the door to the quiet, dusty corners of his mind, he finds himself wondering if she strips Springs like this—in the insensate and indifferent way one would skin an animal. Then he feels sick, like he just sat in on a sex dream about his mother.

And he's clawing at the animal pelt on Jack's floor, its fibrils in his nostrils, his teeth. Nails score his flesh and his hot sobs are obstructed by the carpet. He counts the intersecting H's of his frock and he's sat in the attic, back in Eden. It's ignoble. The lot of it. That which seeps through the gauze. The way Athena double-knots his shoelaces as though he is a child.

One dressed, she exhumes Tim from the bed and bustles him through the shadows. Her subtlety is lost on the cheap white shoes that jar against the mint linoleum like a doorbell, declaring their presence to anyone who will listen. When doubts come creeping, Athena does things the old-fashioned way: gun-to-back. Tim chokes as he walks, having forgotten the fine art of putting one foot in front of the other. Anxiety drives his body. He hangs heavy as time against Athena's shoulder amongst the spacecraft of the docking station, stomach in his ears and heart in his gut.

Since the Sentinel, Jack makes Tim drink from paper cups and wear boots with no laces. He triple-locks the cabinet in the bathroom and has him by the throat when the R-0513 bleaches the toilets. Jack locked him out of the Fast Travel for fear he'll make off with his secrets or worse—that Tim will void his warranty by suffocating in The Diaphragm, by throwing himself off Vertigo Bridge or the scaffolds of the Drakensburg Gangway. Now the universe (and all the deadly things therein) is his oyster.

All he recalls of the flight is that the oxygen masks were deployed.

Planetside, Springs arranges a technical. This is the first Tim learns of her connections. Athena has to hoist him into the thing herself. He reposes in the back of the tank, nursing a mute ache with a hand on his navel and his feet up on the sides. The engine lulls him into a quiet stupor. "Timothy." His head doesn't snap up, not as it should. Athena frowns as she tries it on for size. "Huh. Suits you. And rightfully so." She drums an unmelodious beat against the wheel and Tim exhales for the first time in months.

Without the convenience of matter transfer, it's a cycle-long trip. By the time they reach The Commons, Elpis is out and a dull pain has jacked up to a torturous gnawing that leaves Tim howling like a dog. Athena doesn't tear her eyes off the road. She parks up after laying waste to a gang of bandits that pump the car full of lead. Their corpses leave little in the way of munitions but plenty of the hard stuff. Tim is ready to lead a hair-shirted life from hereon out but Athena doesn't take no for an answer and forces him to knock it back. It's purely palliative and soon knocks him off his stride.

They pull into Hollow Point and he drifts off as Springs and Athena chew the fat out of earshot. Springs is awfully sunny as she heaves the door open. Less so when she set eyes on him. The joint they set up is nothing fancy. Two lock-ups and a garage for Springs' shop. Springs is all arms. Tim is all flinches. Athena and Springs sleep in a pile on the ground like vagrants for four nights until Springs brings home a mattress. His bed is made up of a wet pillow and a tarpaulin sheet but he sleeps better on their couch than he ever did in Jack's bed. 

"Funny," Lilith says. "Athena never touched on this. Like _at all_. And her report was—god, what was it?"

"Sufficiently thorough," yawns the kid. "Lady's really bad at takin' compliments. Really good at skimpin' on the details."

"Guess it wasn't important," Tim shrugs, choosing to make little of it. He's condemn to supplement. He's an anecdote. 

Like most moon-dwellers, Springs is a hoarder with a lunar thievishness about her. She brings back boots and board shorts and books and metal gewgaws that look like hospital balloons. Her sticky fingers make Tim think of Pickle. He often wonders what the kid has that he doesn't, what it is that enables him to endure. Good humour, probably. When Springs can't source canvas, she fashions him an eye patch out of cloth and cardboard.

Tim spends the bulk of his time sleeping. Athena feeds him pills and swatches him in gauze every second day. Springs has him in a chokehold whenever Athena cleans the mucus from his eyelid, for two when she pops the ball back into its empty socket. Hands near his face are tantamount to the most egregious horrors. Athena's vigil is hawk-like and equally distant. For an afternoon, he is lost to to the chills and can't catch his breath. Springs forces white tablets down his throat and presses Drydock-rime to his forehead. Athena heads out to find a quiet place to start digging.

Atlas is a kōan that Tim considers nightly. It hardened Athena's edges. It stole something from her. The absence consumes her like a sickness. He keeps an eye open as she kisses Springs goodnight and steals away like a ghost into the shadows of her past and he is sure it will define her forever. Vault Hunters have unspoken rules, tight lips and patchy memories. That's why Athena isn't subtle when she unsheathes her Aspis and recedes into the night. Because she knows Tim's lips are sealed. There's no telling what would happen if Springs knew that Athena is moonlighting as a hired gun and not an errand boy like she says. Springs asks no questions, simply clasps her hands around the flowers Athena brings her as the apex of her ears turn pink. Tim is convinced she knows, in her heart of hearts.

"You remind her of her sister, you know?" Springs tells him one night after the fever has hightailed it. Athena is off picking lillies of Three Horn's Valley. It's over cocktails of brown water and grog that Springs calls 'mother's milk'. And that's how it starts. "That's what this is about. Said her name was Jess and she had a good heart."

"Oh," he says with his arm around some decrepit novella, modulator crackling as he swallows around the nasty concoction.

"I'd like to have met her, if she were a thing or two like you, I mean." Tim drinks then, and with gusto. He swallows in great, big draughts. Some snide part of him (the part of him that has gotten louder since the program, that had quietly celebrated when Tassiter had crossed the great divide) envies Athena because he can't remember who he was before he wore another man's clothes. He has bits: a name, an impression of a face, the college he went to. He holds onto them like nuggets of gold, scrawls them in the margins of Springs' crappy poetry books in Jack's messy longhand.

When Athena comes home, she tells him about the gig. By the time she gets to the women she's trailing, he has made friends with the bottom of the bottle, too busy seeking the lines of his sister's face to care for the details. He doesn't want to hear about the two girls or their participating father.

Athena melts like butter sometimes. Tim catches her on the coattails of a laugh at one of his crappy jokes or looking at Springs as if she hung the stars. Working together, they slowly unpick Atlas' tight stitches. It is when Athena is taken by a pink apron that Spring thrifted from a corpse that he is confident they will overcome.

"I could get used to you cooking for me."

“Aw, I knew you were a hopeless romantic under that sour exterior," Springs teases and Athena mocks offence. "And not to skite, but I'm a dab hand in the kitchen with the right ingredients. I promise one day I'll cook you something worth a bandit king's ransom but for now, I hope you like soup beans."

"If it's edible then it's adequate."

"That's the spirit! Besides, it's not as if we can blow our dough on a big cheese pizza when there's a hole in the roof the size of a swimming pool, huh Tim?"

"Yeaaah." Tim picks at his fingernails. "And the person who monopolises Pandora's pizza market kinda wants me dead so."

"Oh, I dunno. Moxxi doesn't strike me as the type to bear a grudge."

"Moxxi?" Tim's breath snags on a laugh. He elbows Athena in the ribs and the contemptuous look she gives him makes him regret it at once. "I uh, I don't think we're talking about the same person."

"About yay high? Hips to _die_ for? Walks around like Lady Muck? Cute tattoo on her left nork? Not that I was looking."

"You're disgusting."

"Don't I know it. You know, the old bag is the only thing I miss about that grotty space port even if she kept knocking back. You think she misses me?"

"Probably not."

"Bummer." Springs sighs into the stockpot. "Moxx always favoured blokes with big apricots over gasbags like me anyways. I reckon that's why she liked you so much."

"Because I know when to shut up?"

"No. Because... y'know."

"Oh god. How much did she tell you?"

"Let's just say that those two go way back. Athena used to hang her shield up in the Red Light. And girls tell each other _everything._ Don't they, Athena?"

"Unfortunately. I think I could have gone the rest of my life without thinking about the size of Handsome Jack's gonads."

"No need to worry. She said good things, mostly. Not that I needed to know where the similarities lie or about how uh...good you are with your hands."

Tim turns a furious shade of red and he succumbs to the dining chair. Springs lugs the soup over. It lands on the table with a great thud and Tim's heart sinks to the very pit of his gut. He watches the meat bob in the water like upturned fish and the ball in his throat grows barbs as he clamours to his feet.

"You feeling okay, big guy?" Springs asks as she dishes up. "You're real sweaty all of the sudden."

"Yeah, peachy. I uh, gotta use the bathroom real quick."

"If you say so. You want one helping or two?"

"I think I'll pass. Thanks."

"We were only pulling your leg, Tim." Athena gives him a knowing look.

"Seriously, I'm not hungry."

"I don't buy that one bit. I've barely seen you eat a thing since you touched toe on the planet. I know it's not what you station slickers are used to but it's as fancy as it gets planetside. And it's tastier than that old cereal you've been grazing on. So bog in."

"I'm sure it's delicious but uh—"

"Then what is it?"

"Just drop it, Janey. What happened to 'asking next to no questions'?"

"I'm afraid that courtesy is for customers and doesn't extend to the people I care about. And it's hard not to care about you when you're walking around with your jeans hanging off your hips because you're skinny as a sapling with the bark scraped off so turn it up."

"You're wasting your breath. He eats what Jack eats. He drinks what Jack drinks. He sleeps when Jack sleeps. It's psychosomatic."

"Boy, that's more than a little messed up."

"No. That's not it. Uh, I don't know what's in it is all."

"That all? It's beans and water and a little skag meat. You aint veggie, are you?"

"I thought we moved past this."

"Ay?"

"He is afraid it might be spiked."

"You meant to say after everything we've been through, you still don't trust me? Thanks heaps."

"Can we maybe talk about something else?"

"Gee, Tim. Paranoid much? Some wanker poison your food?"

"Poisoned it. Laced it with neuroleptics. Anaesthetic. Arsenic. Boy, that last one was uh, not fun."

"For either of us."

"Heavy stuff, mate." Springs grimaces. "But I like you far too much to poison you. Can't afford to waste perfectly good grub like that either."

Athena's toe collides with Tim's calf. She makes a show of dipping her spoon into the soup, stirring it hopelessly and swallowing two great mouthfuls for good measure.

"Safe. And delicious."

"Thanks, babe. See! You oughtta have more trust in people."

"And gratitude," Athena barks with her mouth full. "Sit down and eat, you fool."

Tim does as he is told and picks at the food like a bird. He doesn't feel better until Athena and Springs retire for the evening and he's free to play chicken with his forefingers. There's a rush of relief when the soup smacks porcelain. He'd sooner fashion veneers out of it than have Jack discover what is happening to the enamel of his very expensive teeth.

Jack is always lurking like rot beneath the seams. Tim is afraid he'll creep in through the window or between the cracks in the floorboards. That's why he triple-checks his bed before he sleeps. He hauls himself into the bathtub and thinks about Jack. He thinks about the Vault. He thinks about all his progress dismantled by some junker with good intentions. He doesn't dare look in the mirror in cases Jack laugh back from the vanity and tells him he looks like shit. But Jack is far away and Tim is too, stretched so thin he'll tear. 

Tim's mood is as capricious as Atlas stock returns. Mostly, he wears the doldrums like a cloak. Jack's phantom hand rests atop the shelf of his hips, thumbs careful, knowing circles across his wrists and thighs until he prickles all over. It's ceaseless and tiring. It gouges him out and makes recesses of his eye sockets. He doesn't hit the sack until first light hits the back of the cave and casts shadows below his chin. One day, Tim relents and with thin, white filaments maps the make-believe places that Jack touched. Athena wears a face like Tim had spat in it as she reluctantly cleans him up. "You are _not_ to do that," she tells him, rolling up his sleeves. "Not here. Not under my roof. This would kill her." The iodine stings like a bastard. He guesses that's the point.

After the bandages come off, Athena embarks on some vague three-day mission. Failing to mod a five-player B&B campaign for two and tiring of board games, Springs takes him junking. She figures the fresh air will do Tim some good and she's right. Out in Three Horns, a fresh cycle makes the valley its own. Bandit lean-tos laze on the water's edge like a city of lunchboxes. The first light of day kisses their metal roofs. It's as good an alarm clock as any out seeing as the place has been scraped out by Bloodshots and without power for months.

Springs sidles in first. Tim's a dab hand with a pistol but the Bandit pistol Athena loaned him is as heavy as a shackled weight. A gun's a gun but he's one eye down. He'd be lying if he didn't miss Hyperion's aesthetics and their easy trapezoidal screens. Springs is quick on her feet—in and out like a tide. He always envied her nonchalance.

"Coast's clear, Tim," she calls, wringing a pool of sweat out of her headband. "This place is emptier than a corpse's pocket. Nothing of value. Bet some Vault Hunters ripped right on through."

"Good." A pent up breath bursts from Tim's chest and he can finally breathe. "One less job for us."

"Bet you're glad of it. Athena tells me you're a conchie now. That's a commendable way to get yourself killed."

"You've been together for like three months—"

"—Four months and a day! That's threescore years and ten Pandoran time."

"Whatever! Point is you sound just like her. I'm a stray bullet away from Judgement Day and I wanna avoid a gunfight if I can help it."

They've been walking for hours. His shoes feel as tight as a sheath so rids himself of them. They're threadbare and scuffed like a boy's. There's an impulse—to sluice his feet with the bay's saltwater. Something bygone that he can't pin down. Someone had once told him that you don't know the soul of a place until you feel the strength of the sun on your face and the water lapping over your toes. They clearly never visited Pandora.

Springs crouches next to him, dappling the still water with her fingertips, as if daring the quiet to melt into something else. An ambush to prove her point. It's not of this world—the peace. There's no backdrop of gunfire. Not a Rakk in the sky.

"Right," she dares. "Let's say you can't help it. The people shooting at you will have guns. And what will you have? Your wet grundies to wave in surrender?"

"A clean conscience."

"And enough bullets in you to perforate the ruddy Crimson Armory. Speaking of, Athena just called. She's about to expel some ex-Atlas gun bunnies if you're interested. It'd do you a world of good—a quick job to keep you busy 'til you decide what you wanna do with yourself."

"No, thanks. All I want is to build a quiet life for myself and to keep the gunfire to a minimum. I'm not interested in poetic justice."

He takes empty cases and throws them in the water, watches them sink into the ether and wishes they'd take him with them.

"What about the spills?"

"That's blood money."

Springs groans. But she's all smiles as Tim flicks a shell in her direction.

"Money is money."

"Tell that to Athena."

"That's different. I wanna wife her someday. And it aint as though you can stink up our joint forever. What you're experiencing is normal. This is a textbook Pandoran guilt complex. A merc here. A bandit there. What's a couple of dead blokes in the eyes of the universe?"

"Not much, I guess. But a good deal to me."

"God, Tim. You're preachier than those cultists down in Frostburn Canyon. I'm telling you, you'll have a hell of a hard time of it without making things more difficult for yourself. You only just got here, I'm not ready to see you off in a wooden box."

"Lay off me, Janey. I don't get on your case about that scav boss or that guy who looked at 'thena funny."

"He kinda deserved it, though."

"Yeah, that guy was an asshole."

"That guy was so far in the closet his best friends were dust bunnies. Right, okay." Springs hold her hands up in defeat, vollying into an abandoned bandit technical and Tim follows suit. "Well, if you wanna make an honest living around here, you gotta get creative. They grabbed the goods but walked right on past this baby. Probably because it's shit house. I'll show you where the moolah is."

"Never dreamed I'd find myself junking."

"Don't they have cars where you're from?"

"Of course they do. But they also have laws. And foliage. And a knockout force of gravity."

"Sounds lush."

"It was. Wish you could've seen it. You'd have loved the view of the other Edens at night."

"Don't go all soft and introspective on me, Tim."

"I'm trying. It's just—it's a lot."

"Well, you're not the only one feeling homesick. It's a shame you never put that fancy-schmancy degree to good use. Go on, tell me. What were you gonna do? Write a novel?"

"I, uh—"

"You were, weren't you? That's rich. Mate, I love the bones of you but as far as books go, you're a few pages short of yours."

"Never stood a chance. Someone grease monkey cornered the market for children's stories. Always wondered what happened to that baby Kraggon. I wish they'd write the sequel."

"I hear the bad guy's got a tragic backstory and a real smart mouth. Right, enough rabbiting. First, you'll wanna drain the tank. Once I got four gallons of good gas from the tank of some old kombie wagon and it fed me for weeks. That's where your money is. Next, pop the hood and grab the battery, even if it's dead. Oh, and make sure the engine's off if you don't wanna kark it."

"Kark it?"

"Die. You don't wanna die, Tim."

"Guess not," he says, pulling the ignition coil.

The days wane into weeks, the base gets kitted out and Tim runs out of fingernails to make loathly red ribbons of. Athena finds Tim work. She calls her contact Rudiger. Tim calls him as trustworthy as a Hyperion pension scheme. He finds his face a circumstance as mitigating as any. Fearing what might lurk between the lines, he refuses to contract with anything, not even something as harmless as a grill. This is the first time the two of them cross swords. Athena was always a woman of little words but her silence is as vitriolic as blood sport. Once, Tim had known the grind like the back of his hand but now he shares his sun line with a stranger. The inertia is all his.  
  
Tim feels he earns his keep by playing man Friday. He swabs the sides with vinegar and loiters in Springs' shop like a spare part, penning killer catchlines for daydream ads they'll send shooting into space someday. At least, that's what he tells Athena. Pandora's literary offerings leave little to be desired but he spends the better of half of his time reading. Springs doesn't seem to mind but she wears her devil-may-care attitude like a layer of black gold. He doesn't know what she's hiding beneath. Elpis felt like a lunar isolation ward even with five mavericks for friends. Perhaps she's just glad of the company.

Time has made a motley scab of his scar and his empty eye socket has long stopped seeping. In the absence of its brother, his fellow eye does all the work. Tim sits on his ass in the garage, thumbing through a magazine about guns, glutes and girls (in that order). His neck twinges from turning his head to read all of the words.

"Hand me that C-spanner, Tim." Springs' voice boomerangs around the open hood of the car. Tim considers the tackle hanging loosely from her tool belt like he is selecting an instrument needed to perform a complicated surgery.

"Uh, which one's that again?"

"I dunno. Probably the one that's shaped like a C."

"Oh, okay, that makes sense."

He hands her the spanner. Springs takes it without pulling her head out of the bonnet. She hums merrily to herself and he goes back to his quarterly. He skims through an editorial with mild interest. It's about the ethics of arms dealerships and quite profound, considering the penman spells the word "morality" with a generous amount of e's.

"You know, there's a difference between rugged and rough-looking," Springs says as she catches him itching at the stubble that has taken over his chin during his stopover. For someone as sanguine as spring, she's awfully blunt. Tim hasn't yet worked up the courage to take a look in the mirror at the living epitaph to every bad decision he ever made. He sees enough of it in his sleep: the diagonal lines of his chin, the twin wells that have become of his cheeks and the ugly patches of scar tissue that erupt through the dark like long whips of lightning. He doesn't need to see it for himself to know that Springs is right. He can feel that his facial hair has grown long and unruly like the backyard of an derelict house.

He had coveted a beard, once, in some past life—one he'd grow out himself and wear like a three-piece suit or an expensive cologne. Hell, he'd have settled for some peach fuzz or Jack's nasty northern landing strip. Now the disconnect between self and body is less of a journey and more of an oil war. It's no longer about who he is or where he's going. It's about how to stop heaving his body around like a wayfaring ghost.

"I didn't think it mattered all that much," Tim says, taking in Springs' arms, black to the brink with dirt and grease, "considering Pandora's low standards for personal hygiene. I'd kill a man for some sanitary wipes, god."

"Hey! These babies are an occupational hazard. Same can be said for that thing. You look like a bush ranger."

Tim fashions the magazine into a baton and smacks Springs on the back of her legs. Athena burns through the open mouth of the garage, her face a deep curse.

"There you are!" Springs greets. She presses a kiss to her girlfriend's cheek, leaving muck in her wake. Tim's stomach churns furtively. "Any luck?"

"Nothing." Athena's eyes are flinty.

"Nothing?" Springs wipes her hands down on her combats. "Man, the number of people on this planet, you'd think somebody would have an odd job or two." Tim nurses the thought of ex-headsman Athena louring and changing tyres, cutting lawns and delivering mail and a quiet laugh escapes before he can suppress it. "Not to worry, sweetheart. You still have that big gig coming up, right?"

"Yes. But it's protracted." Athena presses her back flat against the side of the runner. "As soon as my client goes the way of the flesh we'll be set for months. But for now, we're playing a waiting game."

"What are you implying?" Tim asks, forgoing his reading material for a cock of the eyebrow.

"Not a damn thing." Athena lays her canines bare. "I'm a professional. I don't take cheap shortcuts and I sure as hell don't lie."

"Gee, no need to be so defensive. I'm sure that's not what he meant, Athena—"

"This is a simple delivery job. I told you about it."

"No, you didn't."

"She did, Tim. You probably forgot. I mean, you were out of your skull like a field rat in a vat of grog."

"You're okay with this?"

"Not at all. But I respect that Athena had prior commitments."

"Not her damn commitments! That you're living hand-to-mouth. Meanwhile Athena here has decades of experience and you have her playing errand boy to a bunch of marauders."

"Hey! Don't try to pin this on me! You were a lily-livered vegetarian last week, now look at you. I don't understand what's going on in that head of yours sometimes. Athena's a hireling. That's how it goes. What's that saying? Beggars can't be choosers?"

Autohn had said that too, back before the modulator pinched like a metal noose around his voice box. Tim's gut performs a dead stick landing between sanctimony and the weight of the things his lovingly engineered body did for want of a roof above its head. Athena storms off through the doorway, boot colliding with the car as she goes. It makes a mighty bang like a gunshot, like surgical steel on surgical steel, like a body colliding with the floor. Tim jolts hard enough to get whiplash, heart losing rhythm in favour of speed, vision sharpening like a rock, pins and needles working their way from his toes all the way up to his lips.

His breath comes back like a slap on the back, alongside the realisation that he is rocking himself like a crazed infant. "Don't know what that was about." Springs is crouched on the floor beside his pathetic back-and-forth, hand on his shoulder. "You okay, mate?"

"Yeah, great. Just need a minute."

"Good, 'cause I've a job for you, you lazy bludger." She tosses him a muffler. "You can pop that dent out."

Tim's hair falls out on his pillow. Eventually, it falls out of its hold and runs away from his face. A little longer and it has a wild look that exudes rebellion. At least, that's what Springs says. It becomes an ongoing gag that he hates. He was never one for the offbeat, too spineless to raise his voice or take up arms. So he never airs it.

One day, Springs comes home from one of her little excursions with a leather jacket and two patches. One is salmon pink and reads "girl gang" in cursive, the other features a cat wearing grandma glasses. Tim is keeping his hands busy by darning a hole in Athena's scarf when he tells her to cut it off. She washes his hair over the sink with a cup and the dregs of a bar of hand soap. Then she parks him in a lawn chair.

"Here?" She asks, dull edge of the kitchen scissors wavering like a threat against his forehead. Tim grunts in affirmation and strips the plastic from the arms of his seat with what remains of his fingernails. "You ready?"

There's no 'yes'. Just a snip. And another and another. Tim is palpitating at the affront to Jack's authority as he watches the shocks of hair hit the floor. It feels like a neat, red circle right between his eyes then a departure of sorts, a change of direction, two birds flipped at the big man in the sky. Springs cards her fingers through Tim's hair after she has finished.

"That's beaut." She hesitates. "I mean, I'm not gonna win any awards for hair-styling or anything. But it's passable."

Springs has one hand around a metal container. Tim flinches. It doesn't worry her like it had the first time and the time after that. It's prosaic, there's no romance in it, no rhyme or reason.

“About time,” Athena tells him, clamping her hand around the meat of her girlfriend's arm and adjourning the big reveal for now at least. "I was so sick of that thing. Now you look like your own person, almost."

Springs looks at Athena like she cradles the universe in her hands. She would take her dancing if she could. But ballroom is a two hand exercise. That would be giving the opposition a coign of vantage, putting the gun in their hands and asking them to shoot. So when they're feeling romantic, the two of them split the grape, climb up on the crag face of the Commons and look up at the stars.

One night, when Elpis is especially astronomical, Springs puts on her nicest, whitest sundress and takes Athena moon-gazing, spins tall tales of the moon and Concordia, the house she grew up in, its indoor garage and its outdoor dunny. Athena tee-hees like a schoolgirl, decades of trauma and violence undone by the sheer front of love. This is when he feels loneliest. Springs is moonstruck and lovesick. She has a sunnier prognosis than him. He's filled with nerves and black stuff, she's filled with sunshine and roses.

Tim has as little interest in playing third wheel as he does revisiting the place that stripped him of himself or the imposing giant that orbits it. Besides, drink turns him into a real bastard. Goading comes with the alcohol and fights come with the goading. His tongue is a combatant, armed and angry.

They are gone for ten minutes before Tim starts pacing to ward off the nausea. Twenty before he makes tracks in the floor. Thirty before he is convinced there are monsters lurking in the cabinets, beneath the carpets. He turns their ramshackle kitchen upside down. The tightness in his chest doesn't relent until the place looks like a garage sale; pots and pans aplenty.

When the two of them finally return, they're tangled up in each other's arms like Mercenary Day lights. Springs is more than a little tipsy, interthreading her fingers with Athena's hair. Athena's hand does a slow crawl up her belly as she presses kisses to her girlfriend's neck. When Tim's manic rattling interrupts their congress, Springs flicks the lights on and they pull apart, faces vexed and perplexed in equal measure.

"Timothy, have you completely lost it?" Athena cuts, cheeks pink. She looks to Tim like he has contracted the shivers or something fathomless, the kind of thing that permeates the subconscious like it did the Lance's bunks. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Nothing. Just giving the place a once-over."

"Whatever for?"

"Y'know, cameras, ECHO recorders, that sort of thing."

"God, Tim," Springs says, "here I was hoping you'd taken it upon yourself to do some spring cleaning. You've officially gone mad. Mad as a cut snake." Tim's lip wobbles. Springs settles down next to him, stinking of berry juice and the cheap perfume that is all over Athena like a rash. "You don't honestly think your old man cares enough to go looking for you, let alone storm the place, do you? It's been days. Weeks."

"Jack and the animals he pays to be his friends share laughs at your expense. They considers you a waste of manpower. Besides, they know nothing of your presence here. That I can assure you."

"How the hell would you know?"

"Athena, honey. Maybe this can wait until morning."

"What can wait? Athena—" The two exchange a look as telling as the truth. Springs laces her fingers with his and tightens her grip until her nails bite into his palms then says, softly, "Athena took one last job up on Helios."

"What?" Tim's voice crack's like a boy's.

"It's a construction job. No human body count."

"And you buy into that? God, I'd rather starve take another penny of that bastard's money."

"No, but it's a damn sight better than stewing in self-pity." Tim can see all of Athena's teeth. Alcohol always made her tongue a little looser. Unlike Springs, she was never one for peppy bromides. "You need to bear the palm, start pulling your weight. We've put you back on the mend and you've been living here rent-free for weeks."

"So has Janey."

"That's different. Janey is my girlfriend."

"Aw, I love it when you call me that."

"I'll find work. God, I'll work four jobs if I have to—but Jack is—he's the reason I'm—please. Take a look at me, Athena. I'm a mess."

"This is Pandora. We all have hangups. But hangups aren't going to put food on my table. Jack is a maniac. But he is also our meal ticket off of this planet once and for all."

"You'r a liar, Athena! You said we weren't gonna—"

"And we didn't. You lack initiative, Timothy, a backbone. Had I left you in that bed, you'd have died there. You said it yourself. You're a mess. And mess turns into anger and anger turns into. Well—" There's a weighted silence. "—As far as Jack's concerned, I left after the Vault."

"Is that what I am to you? Some charity case? Someone you could patch up like you couldn't patch up—" Athena cut him off like a blade through the air with a swift kick to the stomach.

"Don't you dare," she barks and kicks him again. "Keep her name out of your sorry mouth." She doesn't stop kicking until he's doubled over, until Springs is begging her to stop. Tim half-expects her to kill him. He rasps, taking in air intermittently like a fish out of water.

"I had a hand in making that head case what he is. We all did. We're all answerable. I left my morals behind the day I decide to call this work my living. That's the price I have to pay. We're not friends and we're not good people. The sooner you abandon that notion, the better you'll sleep at night. I owe you nothing. I helped you because it's about give and take. Repentance has nothing to do with it." Athena tears Tim's Jacket from its hook on the wall and deposits it on his lap like a dead bird. "Out."

"What?"

"You heard me. Get dressed."

Tim quaves as he pulls on his jacket. It's oversized and too tight around his hefty frame. Springs fights his corner but Athena proceeds to pack like a parachutist. She grabs a go-bag, crams it with the Bandit, some peaches and (in a wave of little faith) two hypos and a half-empty bottle of Bullet Salve. Springs skirts around the room, gathering books and the toothbrush they share. Athena lacerates the air with a pointed yank of the zip. She hoists the bag over her shoulder. Tim wrenches his holsters on.

"Guess I'll hold on to them for you, then, fella." Springs winks and has him by the shoulder, the draff of the wine offering little in the way of balance. Tim's knees are quivery like his smile.

"Don't bother," Athena says, halfway out the door. Her voice is as deep as a well out in Oasis. "You won't be seeing him again."

"Then I'm coming too. Let me drive."

"You won't. I'll only change my mind."

Springs gives him an unsteady hug. She can't wrap her arm around him because of the rifle sling around his back. Before they break apart, Athena has him by the scruff of it and is manhandling him into the car with no room for argument.

In the outrunner, they don't make conversation. Athena wears a face like she's sitting in fifth. On occasion, she spits out of the open window. The crazed barking of the badlands doesn't make for good company so Tim turns on the radio. The last bars of an anomalous rock number fire off the janky speakers. Hyperion pervades all: the sky, the land, the airwaves, his blood. When the megacorp's best voice tells of the happy life and good fortune that awaits the worthy in Opportunity's skytowers, Athena pummels it silent and hangs out of the car, wasting ammo with reckless abandon.

Athena was always a quiet drunk. She knew how to hold her liquor though it always lowered her inhibition some. Whatever's coursing through her has turned her into a feral animal. She's an enigma but Tim knows her well enough to recognise the pent-up rage, the resentment toward a world that dealt her a hand she never truly deserved. Athena is in no fit state to drive but Tim, with half vision and half a death wish, offers up no alternative.

They slow to a crawl in the wasteland east of the bandit encampments that make up the Arid Badlands. They pass a child he mistakes for a collapsed brat, face lit up like a sign for Moxxi's dive tavern as she breaks her baby teeth on a chunk of unrefined Eridium. She balds and draws pictures in the dirt with a stick. It's bizarre, like a smack of colour against a gray painting, a Trash Feeder in a nest of Rakks or a sunny Hyperion eyesore against a yawning desert highway. Athena tells Tim in her forthright way that everybody fucks and that she's the half-human sublimate of a twisted union and a hole that Dahl never stopped digging. There's no charity in the wastes but he came by Athena's honestly. She's is motherly without ever meaning to be. This is the part where she eats the runt but Tim can't bring himself to be mad at her, not really.

Athena drops him at a bus stop by one of Dahl's dying boom towns. Tim recognises it from the schematics of Jack's ostentatious plans. He can't recall its name, only that Jack had wanted to christen it after himself. Tim had punctuated his opinion with an eye roll as he told Jack he could whip up half a dozen better names right off the bat. Jack had used his bare hands to teach him a lesson about constructive criticism.

"This is you," Athena says, hopping out of the door and propping it open with her body like a human wedge.

"'thena," Tim starts as he climbs out, the pain in his ribs leaving him feeling like a walking bruise. "I've been meaning to say thank you—"

"I'm not going to change my mind about this." Athena muscles the bag into his arms and leans against the runner's puffed out chest, examining her fingernails.

"I mean it. For everything."

"Thank me by enduring. That board has jobs. If you decide you'd rather be a man than a meal, that is."

"—what would you be? If this weren't a question of making it, I mean."

"I don't know. Butchery is in my blood. But I'd love to take her to Aquator, have her see the sea." She looks up at the sky and her face softens some. "Don't die where there's nobody to bury you."


End file.
